Jonathan Ross stood before a small group of his fellow students at Anderson University in Indiana and cautioned that the war in Iraq was not the one they were seeing on television.
It was April 2006, and the 23-year-old was recently back from a National Guard deployment to Iraq, speaking at a “Support the Troops” event hosted by the College Republicans. Mr. Ross showed the students photos of charred Humvees and walls pockmarked with bullet holes.
“We just got armor from the dump,” he said, describing how they outfitted their vehicles. “They didn’t supply us with the trucks you see on the news at all.”
Twenty years later, Mr. Ross, now an agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is once again on the front lines of a polarizing mission: the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown in Minnesota.
On Jan. 7, during an enforcement surge in south Minneapolis, Mr. Ross fired three shots into a moving S.U.V., killing Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three. Her partner, Becca, who recorded the standoff on her phone, later said the couple had “stopped to support our neighbors” after federal agents were spotted in their neighborhood.
